Two cheers for the water bond: Opinion

Everyone’s cheering the rare bipartisanship in Sacramento that Wednesday resulted in a water bill for the state ballot.

OK, so hip-hip-hooray.

We, too, think it’s swell that legislators of both parties and Gov. Jerry Brown finally found something they could agree on — almost unanimously. Not a single state senator voted against the $7.5 billion spending plan, $7.1 billion of it in new bonded indebtedness, to shore up California’s water works and prepare for even more drought years. Only two members of the Assembly were naysayers — and, guess what? One of them was our favorite curmudgeon, Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia.

The Republicans got almost as much money as they wanted to build new dams and shore up surface storage. The Democrats got almost as much money as they wanted for groundwater cleanup and sustainability. Environmentalists got a bond that is neutral on the controversial issue of the twin tunnels the governor wants to build in the Sacramento Delta to ensure water will continue to flow to Central and Southern California.

It’s true that the good news is that the spending will be quite a bit less than in the $11 billion bond proposal Sacramento has been kicking around since 2009. But we advocated for a smaller amount of spending — $6 billion — that we think would be more attractive to voters still smarting from the state’s slow recovery from the long recession. We still find the billions of dollars in construction money for the Sites Reservoir and Temperance Flat Dam to be the wrong way to go in 2014 — what one water wonk calls a 19th-century solution to a 21st-century problem. The billions will go for a few hundred thousand more acre feet of storage capacity. Whereas if that huge amount of money was spent on new facilities and pipes to recycle far more water that now is being lost ...